Documentary co-directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, and Sarah Price, with a routinely (for documentaries these days) awful image, about a pair of political pranksters named Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. The film concentrates on their adventures upon setting up a parody website modelled on that of the World Trade Organization, and then fielding invitations from duped television producers and seminar sponsors. Under such red-flag pseudonyms as Granwyth Hulatberi, Hank Hardy Unruh, and Kinnithrung Sprat, we see the front man, Bichlbaum, posing as a bona fide mouthpiece of the WTO in a debate against an anti-globalist on CNBC; we see him at a symposium in Finland unveiling a "managerial leisure suit," in gold lamé worthy of an Ed Wood science-fiction film, and equipped with an Employee Visualization Appendage (i.e., three-foot-long phallus) through which to monitor workers on a closed-circuit TV screen; we see him in a college lecture hall in Plattsburgh, N.Y., shoving down the throats of the students a plan to feed Third Worlders on hamburgers made of recycled human waste ("re-burgers"); and we see him in Australia soberly and plain-spokenly announcing the disbandment of the WTO as presently constituted and its rededication to the goal of truly giving aid to underdeveloped nations at the expense of plunderous corporations. ("Maybe," muses his partner before or after that last event, "it's more fun to be satirical than serious.") A natural reaction to these pranks would be to find the humor too broad, too low, too transparent. Yet the reactions of the audiences at these events, or rather the nonreactions, would seem to refute that finding. For the audience of the movie, then, the humor is likely to be much enriched by the reactions of the audiences on screen. The jokes may not get a laugh, but the ensuing silence may. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.